If they say you can’t vote:
1) Don’t take no for an answer.
2) Demand a provisional ballot.
3) Follow up to be sure it is counted.
4) Call the Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (they are on the web at http://www.866ourvote.org/ same as the phone number.)
5) Be ready, go to the No More Stolen Elections website now.

Here’s a scam I’m hearing about. Some people used the easy loan situation to buy multiple houses. They rented them out. They had tons of cash coming in, maybe not enough to cover the payments and taxes, etc. but they figured they would sell the properties after a while for much more than they paid.
Lately they have stopped making payments on the mortgages, but are still charging the rent. So lots of money still comes in, but none goes out. This goes on and on.
Maybe eventually things catch up, and they are foreclosed. The tenants are evicted – often with no notice at all, with the rent and deposit already paid in advance. The scammer ends up with six months, maybe a year of rent money. Or maybe they haven’t been foreclosed yet and the scam continues.
Will the scammers be eligible for government help to “keep them in their homes” because they haven’t been making their payments?

What about the people who HAVE been making their payments? They won’t be eligible for help? This whole idea of helping people with their mortgages is a dangerous path to go down…

McCain is running an entirely negative, divisive, racist campaign based on lies, intending to trick, manipulate, deceive, divide or otherwise do whatever it takes to get enough people to vote for him.
And we all know it.
So if it works, where are we? Do we accept such a government, elected based on the appeal his campaign is making?
Set aside for a minute all the the voter suppression, problems with voting machines, etc. — that’s not what I want to write about here, go here for what to do about that — and instead imagine that Nov. 5 we learn that McCain is the “winner of the election” and that it comes from a surge of voters responding to his current campaign.
What would that mean? And what do we do? Do we accept a government that we all know is in power entirely based on lies, division and racist appeal? This is a serious question: is such a government legitimate?
I’m asking for a discussion, not making a declaration.Update – An email I received:

Unless there is evidence of illegal activity, yes, we must accept such a government, and, yes, it is legitimate. It is not illegal for an individual operating in an unofficial capacity (as a presidential candidate as opposed to a senator) to lie. Citizens have a responsibility to verify the accuracy of the information they receive. If they choose not to verify it and choose to believe a lie and to act on it with their vote, that is their right, and they deserve to be governed by the lying president they’ve chosen. There’s nothing in a democratic political system that requires a candidate to tell the truth. It is we, each individual citizen, who must require it by refusing to accept any information we haven’t verified for ourselves. We fail miserably at that, so we generally get the government we deserve.

People in my area think a 2-bedroom, 1-bath house for “only” $550,000 is a “bargain” that they should “snap up” because “prices will go back up like they always do.”
That is the language of bubble.
Think about this: People thought that stock in sillyname.com was a “bargain” when it fell to $20 a share, but a little while later no one thought the same stock was a bargain at ten cents a share.

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.
Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government’s cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.

I’m sorry, what? You expected something different?
Every member of Congress who voted for this bailout needs to be recalled.